I sound fat,kukukupo: Our "Obesity problem" has very little to do with nutrition, IMO.An American can very easily spend the entire day sitting in a chair and staring at a screen. 20 years ago, that hardly ever happened (except for the wierdos).

I avoid doing it, but tell me sitting on the sofa watching tv and eating too much [insert favorite junk food] is not full of this wonderful vapid satisfaction.

Some of the best advice I've ever heard about healthy eating is this: Check the ingredients list; if it has one, don't eat that.

While, like most aphorisms, that's a bit much of a sweeping generalization, it's not far off. Cheap food has sugar in it to make it taste good; that's just plain not healthy. The more ingredients something has, whether it's a packaged dinner or just a can of tomato sauce, the more likely it is that it's not healthy.

Here's something that will scare a lot of people: If you eat half an appetizer, a burger, and a dessert at Chili's, you just consumed 3645 calories in one meal (skillet queso with chips, mushroom-swiss burger, and chocolate paradise pie ... none of which is the highest calorie food in its category, by the way). Add some fries and you just broke 4000 calories. That's two days worth of calories in one meal. In order to balance your calorie budget, if you ate that meal tonight, you'd have to go without food until dinnertime on Thursday! Sure, I like that stuff (I picked those particular items for that reason) but I don't like it enough to make it all I eat for two days.

Oh, and just to jump on the bandwagon, a recommendation that insurance reimburse doctors for counseling the 30% of us who are obese is not the same thing, or anything like the same thing, as mandatory classes for 80% of Americans, or anybody else. All else aside, 30 =/= 80.

As for whether people really don't know how to choose good food: You know how stupid the average person is? Now consider that half the people out there are stupider than that. I think I'm gonna go huddle under my desk now.

GriffXX:bionicjoe: cloud_van_dame: kukukupo: Our "Obesity problem" has very little to do with nutrition, IMO.

Portion size has at least doubled. Look at old Coca Cola ads from the 1940s. How big is the glass? About 8 oz.

When I was a kid a large was 20oz at McDonald's. Then they added the 32 oz Supersize.While I was in high school the small went to 16oz, medium 20, large 32, and the super was 44. Then all of the sudden you couldn't even get a 16oz drink for awhile.

Reminded me of this.

[aht.seriouseats.com image 514x672]

That's just one reason why I order off the children's or value menus.

I just want a burger and a soda. I don't want a honking big burger and mega soda.Usually, I don't even bother with fries.

Enemabag Jones:ph0rkEnemabag Jones: The recommendation, published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine, does not apply to the roughly one-third of Americans who are considered overweight, those with a BMI from 25 to 29.9.Got it, it is not going for average overweight, it is going for clinically obese.I firmly believe BMI is such bullshiat on an individual level, although it may work averaging things out.Such bullshiat? So most people with a BMI of over 30 are completely healthy? (That's 203 lbs at 5'9").

It really depends on the source of the weight.

Assuming 203 pounds at 5' 9" and very minimal exercise, that is a worse case scenario.

However what if that person exercises heavy.

/Muscle is 18% heavier then fat. Dumb BMI may work for a population, dumb BMI does not work for one person.

wrong i have 19% body fat. meaning that i need to lose 15% more percent before i look gay

netcentric:kukukupo: Our "Obesity problem" has very little to do with nutrition, IMO.

An American can very easily spend the entire day sitting in a chair and staring at a screen. 20 years ago, that hardly ever happened (except for the wierdos).

so when my aunt spent 20+ years sitting at a machine sewing shirts...you think it made her fat? It didn't. Skinny as a rail.

Thus....you are stupid.

America has an obsession with "exercise". In reality being weight is much more about eating too many calories, not lack of exercise.

Cue a million posts about how muscle burns more calories even when you're sat down, even though that's mostly invented by people who sell exercise products.

Truth is, the difference having more muscle makes is only about one Oreo per day. Much better to not eat that Oreo then spend the next ten years being miserable in a gym trying to get muscular in the hope that it will make you thinner (it won't - you'll go home and eat an extra Oreo to make yourself feel better).

The UK's Channel 4 has a series of TV programs called "Supersize vs. Superskinny". Every week they take a whining fatty who claims to only eat two lettuce leaves a day and a skinny person who thinks they never get fat even though they're constantly cramming food. They watch what they eat then swap the diets around. Every single week you see that they're lying to themselves - fatty is gorging all day long on high calorie foods and skinny is barely eating enough to stay alive. It's all in their heads. Every single week. No exceptions.

kukukupo:Our "Obesity problem" has very little to do with nutrition, IMO.

An American can very easily spend the entire day sitting in a chair and staring at a screen. 20 years ago, that hardly ever happened (except for the wierdos).

In 1992 That was happening alot with a decent number of office workers. It was a fairly new phenomenon for a majority of them at that time, but that sort of thing really started with workstations and main frames in the 80's for a large number of people and for air traffic control and various military personal it had been going on for longer than that.

I stopped drinking soda for a very long time (also started drinking tea/coffee without sugar). Then when I went back and tried it again, I realized how horribly sweet soda is. I cannot drink it anymore, as I feel sick from all the sugar after about 6 ounces of the stuff. I was amazed how deadened my sense of taste was with sweetness when I drank soda regularly.

Exercise is making me healthy and stronger. Simply shedding pounds doesn't do anything to fix the weak, underdeveloped muscles a lazy person has.

I have always tried to eat reasonably healthy and have gone from 185lbs to 167lbs after starting a workout routine 3 months ago. My diet has not changed significantly. In fact I eat more now than I did 3 months ago.

Joce678:Cue a million posts about how muscle burns more calories even when you're sat down, even though that's mostly invented by people who sell exercise products.

Truth is, the difference having more muscle makes is only about one Oreo per day. Much better to not eat that Oreo then spend the next ten years being miserable in a gym trying to get muscular in the hope that it will make you thinner (it won't - you'll go home and eat an extra Oreo to make yourself feel better).

SH:Somebody is getting rich off of all this gluttony. Why not tax those corporations and individuals like it was 1955? They can pay for the medical costs. That would shut everybody up (except the victims of the new costs).

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You realize nobody paid 80% income taxes in 1955, don't you ? Massive system of writeoff and deductions.

Obesity in America is in large part due to the government's actions, so of course we need more government action:

1. Provide massive subsidies to grain farmers.2. Encourage a low-fat diet.3. Create a food pyramid that's mega-heavy on carbs.4. Maintain an insanely high tax on sugar, causing food manufacturers to use high-fructose corn syrup, which does god-knows-what to our bodies.5. Allow seed companies to change the very nature of what we eat, so that today's wheat is processed by our body in a way that leads to Wheat Belly.6. Mandate counseling for fatties.